From: beta_julia@... (Julia Becker)
Date: 2002-04-06T05:34:53+09:00
Subject: Re: TextPad replacement for Linux?

Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@PATH.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message news:<3CAD2DE0.F6F606AA@path.berkeley.edu>...
> Oh, I forgot, Emacs is not a "Unix application", but an OS! :)

Right!

> I like the Nedit macro language, but is it possible to interact with a
> process that's running "ruby -rdebug my_prog.rb", translating keystrokes
> in Nedit to debug commands, 

Translating keystrokes to debug commands? Probably this isn't
possible, at least not directly.

> and hilighting the currently executing line?

There is a so-called backlightning patch for Nedit, that could do this
principially.

> I guess that's asking a bit much...

How did you guess this ?:)

> Maybe if we really want visual debugging, we should develop a DDD
> module, like was done for Python (hint, hint).
> 
> > But Nedit is also prepared to interact with external programs like
> > debuggers, compilers or other programming languages (Perl, Tcl/Tk,
> > Python, shell scripts, or whatever you like - ruby?)
> > 
> > This is done with the built-in macro function shell_command() in the
> > one direction, and with nc (Nedit client) in the other.
> 
> Good point, but that's still not ipc, like I'd need for above. I do use
> shell and macro commands to do things like execute the current window
> (or selection) in ruby, or pass the file off to rdtool, or apply rd
> markup. One of these days I'll parse ruby output for error messages and
> jump to the correct line...

It's more possible, though. What I had in my mind when I said
interaction is shown by NEchoes, a spell-checking mode for Nedit. It
works indeed together with a running background process - a Perl
script that translates between Nedit and an external spell-checker.
Just have a look to get new ideas
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nechoes/

Cheers,
jul